I think media outlets think way too highly of their contribution to AI.
Had they never existed, it had likely not made a dent to the AI development - completely like believing that had they been twice as productive, it had likely neither made a dent to the quality of LLMs.
These news media outlets provide a drop in the ocean worth of information. Both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The news / media industry is really just trying to hold on to their lifeboat before inevitably becoming entirely irrelevant.
(I do find this sad, but it is like the reality - I can already now get considerably better journalism using LLMs than actual journalists - both click bait stuff and high quality stuff)
That seems like a reductive way to consider it. What percent of music was created by Led Zeppelin? What percent of art was painted by Monet? What percent of films by Alfred Hitchcock? It may be a small percentage objectively but they are hugely influential.
fwiw, no llm ive ever used generated in the writing style newspapers and -sites use - hence i honestly doubt they've been given a meaningful boost in relevancy.
How many Reddit, HN, etc. posts are based on NYT articles? How many derivative news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc. are responses to those articles?
> How many Reddit, HN, etc. posts are based on NYT articles? How many derivative news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc. are responses to those articles?
You may get an inconvenient answer when you ask the question the other way around.
How does the entire textual corpus of say, new York times compare to all novels? Each article is a page of text, maybe two at most? There certainly are an awful lot of articles. But it's hard to imagine it is much more than a couple hundred novels. There must be thousands of novels released each year
LLMs are (apparently) massively used to get information about topics in the real world. Novels aren't going to be much help there. Journalism, particularly in written form, provides a fount of facts presented from different angles, as well as opinions, and it was all there free for the taking…
Wikipedia provides the scantest summary of that, fora and social media give you banter, fake news, summaries of news, and a whole lot of shaky opinions, at best. Novels give you the foundations of language, but in terms of knowledge nothing much beyond what the novel is about.
To begin with, your premise is that the only primary sources are press conferences and that press conferences only provide information in response to questions.
But even taking it literally, isn't that one of the things LLMs could actually do? You're essentially asking how a text generator could generate text. The real question is whether the questions would be any good, but the answer isn't necessarily no.
You used to need them, because journalists had the distribution and the sources didn't. In a word of printed newspapers, you couldn't get your story distributed nationally (much less worldwide) without the help of a journalist, doubly so if you wanted to stay anonymous.
Nowadays, you just make a Substack and there's that.
See that recent expose on the Delve fraud as just one example. No journalists were harmed in the making of that article.
Primary sources can and often are, very biased. Journalists are (supposed to be) doing fact checks and gathering multiple sources from all sides. Modern journalism is in a terrible state, but still important.
Imagine if all info about Facebook came from Facebook...
By talking to users? I'm 100% sure Google and OpenAI know every major news story, in much greater detail, long before NYT publishes it.
I'd imagine they already have a database of users such that if multiple people talk about a possibly true subject they can ask subject experts; users related to the subject for clarification and further information.
Many publications put information on the internet for the first time, or curate it for the first time, or research a topic deeper than ever before. Someone - a thinking, feeling human - had to get out there and try restaurants, talk to people, pore through archives, read books, use products. Each of them contribute a little to what we know about the world.
I do this for a living. AI might soon put me out of work. It already more than halved my audience, using my own work. It's sickening to see people cheer for it because they have a bone to pick with certain websites. Eventually those websites will be gone, but so will the good ones that produced critical information.
Had they never existed, it had likely not made a dent to the AI development - completely like believing that had they been twice as productive, it had likely neither made a dent to the quality of LLMs.